Greetings, so i'm trying to use vertex buffer objects, however, glGenBuffers is throwing me an access violation

Checklist time:

i have glew installed.

i have freeglut installed

included in this order

Have you called glewInit() once before calling glGenBuffers in your program and did it return GLEW_OK? If you did, how does the driver identify itself (name/version/possibly the extension string)?

yeah, i have run glewinit, i'll check that other stuff in a sec and see how it is

Have you called glewInit and verified its return value? Just calling glewInit won't be enough, there are plenty of things that can go wrong (most often calling it before an OpenGL context exists or when no context is current).

i have tried calling it both before and after the context exists, though currently it's being called before, wasn't sure when it needed to be initialised since it's included before and DevIL is initialised before also

anyway, currently if i run

The rendering context is created when you call glutCreateWindow, so you cannot call glweInit before that.

perhaps a small side-question ( perhaps not ), are there any standard libraries/functions i can use to pop up a window in case of for example, a error or a specific scenario easily? (ideally something along the lines of windows::showSplashScreen() or showSplashScreen("An error!") or something like that, doesnt even need text or anything, just some external indicator that something has happened without breakpoints.)

For any non-trivial program I would suggest having a decent logging mechanism in place (at least writing stuff to the console, better to both the console and a file). With a simple macro all logging overhead can be completely removed by #undefing a single define (like _DEBUG which is already prepared for you with MSVC default configurations).
Apart from that asserts are also extremely useful because they will reliably trigger an attached debugger in debug builds but will be completely compiled out in release builds.

That said, for something as fundamental as basic initialization, I would not hesitate to use exceptions. Wrap everything in main() inside a suitable try/catch block, place a constant breakpoint into the catch part and rigorously check all initialization steps, throwing a suitably descriptive std::runtime_error when anything fails in an unrecoverable way. Obviously a published program needs to do something smarter, but "std::cout << exc.what() << std::endl" will do during development.

glewInit uses the render context that is current. So until you have OpenGL initialize and have wglMakeCurrent set up with a render context glewInit will fail